Volume 10 (2013)

In this issue:

[Click Current and Past Issues for Downloads of Each Article]Editor's Introduction by Travis YorkAdvancing Graduate Student Agency by KerryAnn O'MearaThe
Development of Academic Self-Efficacy among First-Year College Students
in a Comprehensive Public University by Christos Korgan, Nathan
Durdella, and Mark StevensGender, Spirituality, and Community Engagement: Complexities for Students at Catholic Women's Colleges by Kathryn A. E. Enke and Kelly T. WintersThe Impact of State Financial Support on the Internationalization of Public Higher Education: A Panel Data Analysis by Chrystal Annunciata George Mwangi

Affirmative Action as a Precarious Value

“Institutions which
one generation regards as only a makeshift approximation to the realization of
a principle, the next generation honors as the nearest possible approximation
to that principle, and the next worships as the principle itself.It takes scarcely three generations for the
apotheosis.The grandson accepts his
grandfather’s hesitating experiment as an integral part of the fixed
constitution of nature.”

-Woodrow Wilson (1887, p. 209)

When we look around us, we
take for granted the battles fought by previous generations.As Woodrow Wilson wrote, cautious gains
become ubiquitous with time.Women’s
suffrage, Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, Title IX and female
sports—each of these was once a radical proposition, vehemently opposed.Why does affirmative action buck this
trend?Why is it that instead of growing
more sacred with time, affirmative action is repeatedly attacked (first in Bakke, then Grutter, and now Fisher—not
to mention state bans such as California’s Proposition 209 and Michigan’s
Proposal 2)? America is still plagued with inequality and intolerance, but the
question remains, why have some efforts toward equality been more accepted than
others?

Historically speaking,
selective admissions processes were created as a means for exclusion (see
Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: The Hidden
History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton).Americans’ demand for access to higher
education grew faster than colleges and universities could bear, so more and
more colleges formalized selective admissions procedures.This has led to what David Labaree has
characterized as the Groucho Marx complex; like Marx, many prospective students
“don’t want to belong to any club [university] that would accept me [them] as
one of its members.”(In the recent Fisher v. University of Texas case,
Abigail Noel Fisher was unsatisfied with her acceptance to Louisiana State
University.)Part of the problem is that
because of competitive admissions processes, some people see affirmative action
as rigging a zero-sum game.

Still, this doesn’t fully
answer why affirmative action has not been enshrined as a hallowed American
institution.We love when men like
Barack Obama and Ted Cruz live out the American dream, rising from humble beginnings
to attend some of the nation’s most selective universities and become leaders
of society; however, we vacillate in our commitment to policies that can make
real-life Horatio Alger stories more a rule than an exception.

We know that values can
change over time otherwise there would never be social progress.But we don’t often think about what makes
some values stronger than others.Burton
Clark’s writing offers a way to think through this problem.Clark argues that social values are
precarious when they are not articulated in stakeholders’ goals or
standards.He also finds that values are
precarious when they are seen as belonging to smaller groups and are not
accepted by the larger “host” population.

Secure
values, then, are those that are clearly defined in behavior and strongly
established in the minds of many.Such
values literally take care of themselves.Precarious values, on the other hand, need deliberately intentioned
agents, for they must be normatively defined, or socially established, or both.
(pp. 8-9)

The overwhelming consensus of
social science research* shows that affirmative action has social and academic
benefits for majority students—the classmates of minority students.Although affirmative action has many
intentional agents, I would argue that the idea that affirmative action
benefits everyone has not been “strongly established in the minds of
many.”

Moving forward we must continue
to normatively define and socially establish support for affirmative
action.We must continue to find—and
more importantly publicize—evidence that shows the benefits of affirmative
action.Too often, evaluation metrics do
not account for ethnic or socioeconomic diversity in university
admissions.Diversity is not, but could
easily be, included in the U.S. News and
World Report’s rankings and other popular sources that are accessible to
students and their parents (and valued by institutions).Special efforts should be taken in “new
destination” states and areas that are becoming more ethnically diverse so that
they do not adopt reactionary affirmative action bans as others have before
them.

It has been said that “the
arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”There was a day when women were not allowed
in the academy, but two centuries later women outnumber men in American higher
education.I am optimistic that
America’s colleges and universities will be diverse and dynamic learning
environments, but only if we are defenders of diversity and strengthen the
precarious value of affirmative action.

Frank Fernandez is a PhD Candidate in
Higher Education and Research Assistant at Penn State's Center for the
Study of Higher Education.